A Colder Eye
by cassowary
Summary: Post-Inheritance. The Queen of Alagaesia still suffers alone, but begins to find hope again underneath her masks. Not so much an end as another beginning to healing.


_I am the Spirit Moon...__  
__You do not see me for I am hidden__  
__inside the soul.__  
__Others want you for themselves but I call you__  
__...back to yourself.__  
__You give me many names but I am__  
__beyond all names.__  
__I am the garden of all gardens__  
__I speak as the King of all flowers__  
__I am the spring of all waters.__  
__My words are like a ship and the sea__  
__is their meaning.__  
__Come to me and I will take you__  
__to the depths of spirit..!__  
__~ Rumi_

The days were scorching desert heat; the nights were cold with the great moon watching over the sleeping imperial city and her proud towers and fortresses: the silent bazaar; the wild alleys; taverns lit with dancing girls and singing men.

In her lonely tower the moon was too close and too cold, watching her with a hard eye that brought back all the memories she pushed away with work, too busy to even recognize how they were literally burned onto her once-flawless young skin.

The High Queen slept alone in the cold nights with no fire to warm her room, cast a soft rosy light of dawn on her velvet-dark skin and soften the horrible scars that showed over the collar of her nightdress when she tossed in her unrest, clammy, her eyes flickering under their closed lids.

She needed no fire; her sleep was cold in a cold desert under an unforgiving moon; because fire was in her dreams every night: a red-hot iron poker pulled from the coals of a roaring fireplace and pressed to her skin again and again.

Her days, her nights, her dreams were too hot, too cold.

She shivered on the cold stone slab and icy shackles around her wrists and ankles.

She shivered in her royal bed under the moon that shone from her expansive balcony.

She burned with her old torment, and the rage that stemmed from it.

She burned her life away in the brutal desert days, burning with passion for work and politics and striving for just one scrap of that control that had been forcibly burned away from her in that chamber so many years ago…

But there were other things she was haunted by, as well. A warm embrace that wrapped all of her beaten body and shielded her from the cruelties of that chamber and the world; a warm shoulder that she cried upon when it was all too much…but still, the warmth of that companion, that protector proved false at a deeper level: not physical was this cold, but rather she perceived that horrible frozen core of anger that poisoned everything it touched with bitter black veins of sorrow and desire.

That coldness touched and infected her as well, before she even realized what it was; as soon as that burning poker rested on her collarbone. It was borne of pain and helplessness and rage, it made everything clear and magnified and in her heightened awareness she was torn between giving into the horror and almost believing that she could break her restraints and tear out her captor's heart with her bare hands.

In the end the restraints were too strong and eventually the pain smoldered and froze over.

Oh, she could not forgive, but now she understood far too well.

Every desert night was colder than the last as her heart laced with hoarfrost, struggling in dreams and wakefulness to reconcile the bright-burning Queen of the day with the frail, cold woman in an empty bed, borne witness by an indifferent moon. And neither could be reconciled with either warm embrace or bitter frozen rage that she hadn't felt since that fateful day…the ghosts of red wings flashed in the moonlight out of the corners of her sleepless eyes; sometimes she fancied she could feel the warm weight of a sword-callused hand at the base of her throat or on her shoulder when at last she closed her weary eyes; she remembered dark hair lifting in a sudden gust of wind; the sun painfully bright after a long time kept locked away indoors; falling to her knees painfully on cobbled stones with tears running down her cheeks while above her she heard the rush and roar in the sky that only said _freedom_.

The ghosts of lips whispered thanks in her ear. They said _thank you_ and _I'm sorry_ and _goodbye_.

She had not heard of the owner of those lips or those hands or that dark hair; the owner of the frozen heart and the warm embrace; the one who had tortured her until she felt the same icy despair and powerlessness creep over her and she could not be entirely restored or regained…

The unfeeling moon watched impartially, not painful like the streams of tears that she cried some nights; nor bearing the flashes of great ruby wings in the darkness. But it also was not the unseen fixed coldness of despair either: the pale light lit the scars on her dark skin and the skies were clear of the shadows that haunted her heart and mind; the ghosts that whispered to her and disappeared into the light while she was still blinded with the misery that had been shared, forced upon her.

_Those_ ghosts had been freed, roaming wild under the same moon that watched over her troubled nights; released from their own bonds to come and go as they pleased, maybe when the broken spirits began to heal and their own scars began to fade.

During the scorching days under the blinding sun she forced away her pain. During the nights she was haunted and she trembled, whether from fear or weariness or cold under the silver-white eye of the uncaring moon.

When sleep fully evaded her, the Queen gazed back at the moon and let her own heart soar with the memories of the rushing wings and sheer, wild unexpected _hope_ and _freedom_ she saw through her own tear-blurred eyes.

Her heart flew wild and bright and utterly _real_ in the empty skies.

_*Author's Note: Long time, no see, kids!_

_I haven't really had much time to write anything for quite a while, so I'm posting this while the bug has bitten. Of course, I deviated quite a bit from the original purpose (above) by the end, but this was inspired at first by "I Am The Spirit Moon," Davod Azad's rendition of a Bach song put to lyrics by, of course, Rumi's poem._

_People reading in English probably know who J.S. Bach was. I could probably safely guess that most of us haven't been familiar with the poems of Rumi, or, of course, Davod Azad's amazing musical arrangements._

_Please review, tell me how to improve, and have a great day!_


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